More than half the women who appealed their compensation for having been in Magdalene laundries received additional payments, a report published on Monday revealed.
Of the 231 cases reviewed by barrister Mary O’Toole, a total of 134 had their payments increased by between €1,000 and €44,500. The total cost of the payments’ uplift was €1.3 million.
The O’Toole review of the Magdalen Restorative Justice Ex-Gratia Scheme was established in 2018 following an Ombudsman investigation into numerous complaints about its operation.
The Ombudsman found the scheme, established in 2013, was overly reliant on accounts and records from religious orders that ran the laundries in establishing how long applicants had spent in them.
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Length of time in the laundries was a critical factor in the amount a woman would be compensated, with payments ranging from €11,500 for one week to three months, up to €100,000 for periods of 10 years or more.
The Ombudsman further found women lacking full capacity to look after their affairs had been unjustly excluded from the scheme.
By February 2026, according to the Government, €33.4 million had been paid in ex gratia awards to 834 applicants who qualified under the scheme.
In her report, O’Toole said her team reviewed appeals from 231 women.
[ Nuns who ran Magdalene laundries have not contributed to redress for womenOpens in new window ]
Of these, 14 “related to women who had capacity issues” and the remaining 217 cases “were concerned with whether an applicant’s length of stay in the Magdalene laundry institutions had been correctly assessed”.
O’Toole made arrangements under section 68 of the 1871 Lunacy Act, no longer in force, to ensure applicant women about whom there were capacity concerns benefited from their awards.
Of the remaining 217 cases, 134 had their awards increased, she said.
Her team traced Department of Social Protection and school records to get as full a picture as possible of the women’s lives at the time.
“There were a small number of cases ... where the length of stay found by the review was considerably greater than the period claimed by the applicant.”
This happened where the review found records showing the woman had been in the laundry or laundries “for longer than she had recalled”.
In a “very small number of cases”, applicants’ lengths of stay were increased “where it was undisputed that the applicant had been sent to a laundry because she had been, or was suspected to have been, sexually abused at a young age”.
“The practices at certain times was that, rather than removing the perpetrators, it was the young girls who were removed from their homes and familiar surroundings.
“These blameless young women were sent to a Magdalene laundry. In those circumstances, notwithstanding that school or laundry records indicated otherwise, the review determined length of stay in those cases in accordance with the applicants’ accounts.”
Looking at the ages of the 217 women appealing lengths of time in laundries, in 2018 the largest proportion, numbering 88, were aged between 71 and 80 years. A total of 80 were between 61 and 70 – the youngest cohort.
Some 29 were aged between 80 and 90, and six were over 90 years old.
